# Gated Relational Alignment via Confidence-based Distillation for Efficient VLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22709 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22709/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 53 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning and the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02406/) (2015)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07895/) (2023)
- [OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13137/) (2023)
- [LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17888/) (2023)
- [BitNet: Scaling 1-bit Transformers for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11453/) (2023)
- [Microscaling Data Formats for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10537/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Towards Joint Quantization and Token Pruning of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17320/) (2026)
- [Beyond GSD-as-Token: Continuous Scale Conditioning for Remote Sensing VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07562/) (2026)
- [Semantic Granularity Navigation in Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21190/) (2026)
- [TinyNeRV: Compact Neural Video Representations via Capacity Scaling, Distillation, and Low-Precision Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09220/) (2026)
- [Neutral-Reference Prompting for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15615/) (2026)
- [PrismQuant: Optimal Null-Space Rotations for Grouped Quantizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32429/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal performance but are costly to deploy, and post-training quantization often causes significant accuracy loss. Despite its potential, quantization-aware training for VLMs remains underexplored. We propose GRACE, a framework unifying knowledge distillation and QAT under the Information Bottleneck principle: quantization constrains information capacity while distillation guides what to preserve within this budget. Treating the teacher as a proxy for task-relevant information, we introduce confidence-gated decoupled distillation to filter unreliable supervision, relational centered kernel alignment to transfer visual token structures, and an adaptive controller via Lagrangian relaxation to balance fidelity against capacity constraints. Across extensive benchmarks on LLaVA and Qwen families, our INT4 models consistently outperform FP16 baselines (e.g., LLaVA-1.5-7B: 70.1 vs. 66.8 on SQA; Qwen2-VL-2B: 76.9 vs. 72.6 on MMBench), nearly matching teacher performance. Using real INT4 kernel, we achieve 3× throughput with 54% memory reduction. This principled framework significantly outperforms existing quantization methods, making GRACE a compelling solution for resource-constrained deployment. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/ForeverBlue816/GRACE.